April 15, 2009

Adventureland, Kevin Wilson, & using pop cultural references as they should be

A couple of things I've kind of enjoyed the hell out of lately: Adventureland & Kevin Wilson's Tunneling to the Center of the Earth.

First, Adventureland had me won over pretty early on, maybe before I'd even seen it (while, of course, being afraid of disappointment) by sheer fact of having Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader and Martin Starr, who are all great (I've been rocking out with a lot of Starr lately, watching, and really enjoying, Party Down on Netflix's "watch now" feature because I don't have TV much less the Starz channel). It also convinced my that Kristen Stewart is pretty sexy, a fact I'd never before realized or even thought of. Anyway, it's good times. I kinda went into it expecting it to be super laughy, which it wasn't exactly, but it was great in the way that an amusement park movie set in the 80's should be.

For anyone making a youth nostalgia film, it's easy enough to nail the signifiers: the clothes and the cars, the great songs (or kitsch classics), the ''casual'' references to famous news events. What's harder to catch is the mood, the vibe, the aspects of an era we didn't even know were defining until the movie revealed them.

and something about that stuck with me, and I thought about it again when reading Wilson's new, kickass story collection, specifically "Mortal Kombat." The story is about these two kinda geeky high school AV guys who have no other friends and then start to grow curious and push into... well... more than just being. It's a really great story though the moment that especially stuck out was this:

They have different game systems, and Wynn's brand, bowing to parental and governmental concerns, will play only a censored version of the game. No Blood. No heads exploding from electrocution. Not nearly as much fun.

That conceit ends up playing a major role in the story and... wow... it's just handled so well. I mean, maybe I just love it because I so specifically remember the "sweat" flying off Kombat fighters instead of blood. I don't even know what I'm getting at exactly but just, it seems like it would be easy to throw some Mortal Kombat references into a story and sucker me into enjoying it, but Wilson doesn't just name drop or add cool trivia but he subtly uses it to his advantage, never being showy.

On an ending note, I was at a friend's this weekend and played some Street Fighter on... I think it was XBox... and it was weird controlling Blanka and Guile again, for the first time in like 15 years and many gaming systems removed, and still remembering how to do Chun Li's "spinning bird kick."